Search Cheerleader Seeks Text Analytics Unicorns
June 12, 2015
The article on Venture Beat whimsically titled Where Are the Text Analytics Unicorns provides yet another cheerleader for search. The article uses Aileen Lee’s “unicorn” concept of a company begun since 2003 and valued at over a billion dollars. (“Super unicorns” are companies valued at over a hundred billion dollars like Facebook.) The article asks why no text analytics companies have joined this exclusive club? Candidates include Clarabridge, NetBase and Medallia.
“In the end, the answer is a very basic one. Contrast the text analytics sector with unicorns that include Uber — Travis Kalanick’s company — and Airbnb, Evernote, Flipkart, Square, Pinterest, and their ilk. They play to mass markets — they’re a magic mix of revenue, data, platform, and pizazz — in ways that text analytics doesn’t. The tech companies on the unicorn list — Cloudera, MongoDB, Pivotal — provide or support essential infrastructure that covers a broad set of needs.”
Before coming to this conclusion, the article posits other possible reasons as well, such as the sheer number of companies competing in the field, or even competition from massive companies like IBM and Google. But these are dismissed for the more optimistic end note that essentially suggests we give the text analytics unicorns a year. Caution advised.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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